Introducing Ethos Design
Semi-regular posts about how design and designers might help people grapple with responsibility and complexity at work.
Illustration: Francesca Serpelloni
Welcome.
I fell into design from a background in philosophy, and still today, I think of myself as a philosopher in the Socratic tradition - walking through the marketplace, trying to help people articulate, and act on, their sense of what Good means.
In 2022, I’ve both taken on a design leadership role and started a fellowship in ethical leadership with the Cranlana Institute. This has exposed me to a lot of new mental models and generated a lot of ideas that I want to share with you.
So please treat every post here as an experiment, and a request for input. I’m looking to be challenged and to start some a dialogue, but at the same time I’ll be using these posts to develop for myself a way of communicating the excitement and possibilities I see in these ideas, without slipping back into academic jargon.
So what is Ethos Design?
Ethos Design is the design of environments, processes and experiences to enable people to act on their social and moral responsibilities at work. It’s about building the capacity for people to not just behave rightly, according to some conception created for them, but empowering them to make their behaviour more ethical over time.
I call this Ethos Design for two reasons. Firstly, I want to differentiate it from a paternalistic conception of designing for more ethical behaviour - ie design that simply nudges people toward a preconceived idea of good behaviour. Paternalistic design implies that "we know what's right and what's wrong, we just need to get people to behave accordingly".
By contrast, Ethos Design aims to be agonistic - recognizing that ethics is situational, and historical, that taking responsibility is hard, and there isn’t always a simple answer. Complexity theory (especially Cynefin) will come up a lot - because being fully human is about trying to be as reasonable as we can be in situations that aren’t themselves always rational or orderly. We can’t behave ethically if we oversimplify complex moments and relationships.
Ethos Design is also about enabling an ethical culture. Ethos designers, as I think of them, want to design for local ethical capability - incorporating moral sensibilities into practices, and building the capacity for informed, responsible action by real teams in real situations. Ethos design is possible (I hope), because while we don't know what's right or wrong in every situation, we know how ethical intuitions and responsibilities get swamped or suppressed by other challenges and concerns. I hope to leverage what psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, developers, product managers, and other designers have learned about how to build more intelligent and effective teams, and put those insights to work on ethical teaming and innovation. (I’m looking at you, John Cutler)
Lastly, Ethos Design is bound up with the role of technology at work. Technology (and the businesses it supports) should enable us to be more fully human, and that includes living our values, refining and expressing those moral sentiments that drive us to attempt to collectively create value for people we have never met, and may never meet.
Who knows where this will lead? Join me, and let’s work it out together.